Word: superblock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During the last ten years Le Corbusier has also designed Chandigarh, the new capital city of India's Punjab province, and large superblock apartment houses in Marseilles and Nantes; these three projects embody the radical concepts of city planning which Le Corbusier first developed in the 1920s...
...once housed Detroit's wealthy. Its students fill the classrooms 14 hours a day, and some of them have to meet in a garage. Yet everywhere loom the cool creations of famed Detroit Architect Minoru Yamasaki (TIME, Nov. 17, 1958), who is turning ugly Wayne into a graceful "superblock" of imaginative buildings...
...civic design in this country; in many foreign countries the distinction between architect and urbanist is considered artificial and dangerous in its encouragement of an overly technical and mechanical approach--planners computing the incremental cost of the necessary cubic feet of air per average inhabitant in a sanitized superblock--without regard for the human element involved...
Mayer's Punjab city plan is composed of units called superblocks. Each superblock covers a rectangle approximately 1,000 yards long and 500 yards wide. A superblock is designed to house 5,000 people, includes a central area with elementary schools, playgrounds and parks, and a shopping center. Three superblocks make up a district, with the high schools, swimming pool and auditorium for the district in the center superblock. Only footpaths, bicycle and bullock-cart paths cross the superblocks: all bus, truck and automobile traffic goes around them; for direct traffic to the capitol from outside the city...
...have derived from beginning at scratch, on a site as large as this." Snorted he: "As things go nowadays one has only a choice of nightmares. Shall it be the old, careless urban nightmare of post-Civil War New York ... or shall it be the new nightmare, a great superblock, quiet, orderly, self-contained, but designed as if the fabulous innkeeper Procrustes had turned architect-a nightmare not of caprice and self-centered individualism but of impersonal regimentation, apparently for people who have no identity but the serial numbers of their Social Security cards...